Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty Three
Teresa
Once again, I am sitting in a federal office trying not to look like a woman who wishes she were anywhere else.
The room is exactly the kind of room I would expect from the Bureau—too cold, too beige, too aggressively functional.
Metal desk. Neutral walls. No softness anywhere. Even the light overhead feels interrogative. The chair is stiff beneath me, the kind designed to remind you that comfort is not on offer here.
Across from me sits the same agent as before.
Special Agent Callahan.
Mid-forties, maybe. Square jaw. Controlled expression. Dark suit, white shirt, no looseness anywhere in his posture. The kind of man who probably prides himself on reading people quickly and accurately, which means he is exactly the kind of man I need to stay very careful around.
Because he does not believe me.
Not really.
I can see it in the way he watches my face a beat too long after every answer, as though he’s waiting for the crack. The hesitation. The flicker of fear. The tell that says she’s compromised. She’s manipulated. She’s traumatized. She’s attached to her captor.
Maybe all of the above.
Maybe brainwashed.
I know the framework. I know the language they would use for a woman in my position. I know the case notes they would draft after I leave this room. In some version of this story, they are not even wrong.
That is what makes this so dangerous.
My attorney, Valerie Mendel, sits to my left in a navy suit and sharp red lipstick, every inch of her radiating expensive competence and simmering impatience.
She had called me less than an hour ago to say Roberto had gotten word that Vito had been arrested on suspicion of kidnapping despite my prior statement.
Which, frankly, is not a surprise. I never truly believed my first interview would be enough to cool them off.
Not with the Conti name attached. Not with a disappearance as an excuse for them to go after them.
Valerie had said, very clearly, “You need to stick to the story.”
I know.
I have been sticking to it since the moment I got back.
Callahan folds his hands on the desk. “Dr. Donato, I’m going to ask you again to walk me through the timeline.”
His voice is even. Patient. Which somehow feels more aggressive than if he were openly hostile.
I meet his eyes.
“I was called out of town for an emergency related to my work,” I say. “I can’t discuss the specifics because of HIPAA. I activated my contingency plan and left town.”
His expression does not move.
“You’ve said that.”
“Yes.”
“And after that?”
“After that,” I say, keeping my voice level, “I extended the trip.”
“With Mr. Conti.”
“Yes.”
He glances down at his notes, though I have the distinct impression he doesn’t need them. This is not for his memory. It’s theater. Pressure.
“Voluntarily.”
“Yes.”
“And this was a romantic trip?”
The word feels odd.
Romantic.
As if that is what best describes a private island, an emotional breakdown, and a series of choices that have rearranged my understanding of myself from the inside out.
“Yes,” I say anyway.
“A new relationship.”
“Yes.”
“And you had just decided to leave with him.”
My attorney shifts beside me.
I answer anyway. “Yes.”
Callahan looks up. “Had you traveled out of town with him before?”
“No.”
“Had you traveled out of town with anyone else you had only recently begun seeing?”
Valerie cuts in before I can answer.
“I fail to see the relevance of my client’s dating history.”
Callahan doesn’t even look at her. “It establishes a pattern. Or lack thereof.”
I can feel Valerie calculating whether she wants to object harder or let me answer.
I decide for her.
“I hadn’t taken a trip like that before,” I say.
Callahan’s gaze comes back to me immediately. “So this was unusual.”
“Yes.”
“Yet not concerning enough to alert anyone.”
I keep my face neutral.
“No.”
He studies me for a second. “Why not?”
“Because I’ve known him for years,” I say. “We attend the same church. We were not strangers to each other.”
That seems to interest him.
“Same church,” he repeats.
“Yes.”
“Yet the relationship became romantic recently.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Excuse me?” I ask.
“If you've known each other for years and you feel so strongly about each other that you would go out of town so soon into the relationship, what changed?”
It's an intimate question disguised as an investigative one.
He's looking for the story behind the story. He's looking for a reason. A motivation.
Something that doesn't align with a normal relationship.
I don't give him one.
“We ran into each other outside of church one evening. It was a different dynamic, and we discovered feelings that hadn't been there before. Or that we hadn't realized were there. That’s not unusual in adult relationships.”
The answer is a little vague.
A little romantic.
And entirely true.
It sounds like something I would have read in a romance novel, and that's the point.
It sounds like a fantasy, which is why it doesn't sound like something I would have fabricated after the fact.
Callahan doesn't like it.
I can see that in the way he leans forward an inch.
“Dr. Donato,” he says, “you’re a highly intelligent, accomplished woman with a reputation for discretion and professionalism. You don’t strike me as impulsive.”
I say nothing.
“And yet you left town, set up a cover story, went to a private island with a man you’d only recently begun dating, and disappeared for a period of weeks without clear communication.”
I stay silent.
Let him assemble the facts as he wishes to see them.
He continues, “You understand that from our perspective, that behavior is not just unusual. It's alarming.”
I nod once.
“I understand your perspective.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Then help me understand yours.”
I feel Valerie go still beside me, but this is what I have been preparing for. This is the gap in the story. The soft spot. The place where an emotional truth has to fill the logical void.
I lean forward slightly, and my voice drops a little.
“Agent Callahan,” I say, “I’m going to be honest with you. More… open than I probably should be in a room like this.”
I see him register the shift in tone.
“Please do.”
“My work is… intense. It takes a lot out of me. And the events that precipitated my leaving—those were even more intense.” I pause. “By the time that was resolved, I was exhausted. Not just tired, but… depleted. In a way I’ve never been before.
“I graduated from high school at fourteen.
Went straight to college, finished my program early with research experience.
Got my PhD at an Ivy League, then clinical rotations, internships, licenses in multiple states, and I came back here and opened my own practice.
I know you can read all that in a file with my name on it, but I need you to understand just what I mean when I say that I've worked nonstop for years.”
I take a breath.
I don't need to fake the emotion in my voice. I don't have to invent the exhaustion. It’s there. It’s real. All I’m doing is repurposing it. Changing its cause.
“Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly,” I continue.
“I wasn’t making choices from a place of logic or strategy for the first time in my life.
I was making choices from a place of profound burnout.
I just… wanted to be somewhere else. With someone who made me feel safe.
Who wasn’t connected to the parts of my life that were crushing me. ”
I look him straight in the eye.
“So when Vito offered me that—an escape, a place where I could be unreachable for a few weeks, a place where the demands couldn’t follow—I said yes.”
I let that hang in the air.
I can see in Callahan’s face that I have given him something new. Not a confession. Not an admission of guilt. Something messier. More human. Something harder to categorize.
He is quiet for a long moment.
Then, quietly, “Did he coerce you?”
“No.”
“Threaten you?”
“No.”
“Limit your communication with the outside world while you were there?”
This is the question.
The hinge.
The point where the story either stands or collapses.
“No,” I say. “I could have left any time I wanted to.”
I see Valerie nod almost imperceptibly.
“Did you feel you couldn’t?” Callahan presses.
“I didn’t want to.”
He’s quiet again. I know what he’s doing. He’s recalibrating. He came in here expecting one of two narratives: a traumatized victim in denial, or a liar with something to hide.
What he got instead was a confession of vulnerability that is both plausible and frustratingly difficult to attack.
He can't push too hard without looking like he’s dismissing a professional woman’s agency. He can't treat me like a victim without undermining his own questions about my complicity. And he can't dismiss my explanation because it’s coherent and emotionally consistent.
He’s backed into a corner where the only path forward requires him to question my sanity, not my story.
And that is a dangerous place for him to go.
But the idiot does it anyway.
He leans back slightly in his chair and regards me with a thoughtful look that I do not trust for one second.
“Dr. Donato,” he says, “your professional specialty is violent offenders.”
There it is. I had been waiting for this line of inquiry since the first interview.
Big mistake.
“Yes.”
“And yet you’re asking this Bureau to believe that your involvement with Vito Conti is merely personal.”
“Yes.”
His eyes stay on mine.
“You don’t see any conflict there?”
I'm not letting him get away with it that easily. I'm going to make him say it.
“Conflict in what way?”
He doesn’t blink. “In the sense that you work with violent men for a living, and then begin a romantic relationship with one.”
Valerie sits up straighter beside me, already bristling.
“What exactly is it that you're implying, Agent Callahan?” I ask calmly.
That earns me the faintest narrowing of his eyes.
Good.
Let him work for it.
“Only that your choice of Mr. Conti is peculiar given your work,” he says.
“Peculiar is not a legal standard,” Valerie says briskly.
Callahan keeps talking as though she hasn’t spoken.
“You work with violent men,” he says to me. “Men with criminal histories. Men who manipulate, intimidate, coerce.” A pause. “And then you begin a romantic relationship with Vito Conti.”
Walk right into it, you bastard.
My spine goes even straighter.
I keep my expression composed.
“You want to know if I was drawn to him because of my work,” I say.
“I want to know,” he says, irritated, “whether you make a habit of sleeping with your clients.”
Valerie explodes before I can even inhale.
“This interview is over,” she snaps, standing up so quickly the chair scrapes back across the floor with a screech of protest. “My client came here voluntarily to assist with an inquiry, not to be subjected to baseless, misogynistic insinuations about her professional conduct and personal life.”
But I stay seated.
And I put a hand on Valerie’s wrist, a clear signal to stand down.
She looks at me, furious. Ready to end this. Ready to take me out of here.
I meet her eyes. Just for a second. A reassurance. I know what I'm doing.
She hesitates, then slowly sits back down.
I turn back to Callahan, who looks like he just got handed a gift he wasn't expecting.
He's an even bigger idiot than I thought.
“Agent Callahan,” I say, and my voice is like ice. “You are here to investigate a potential kidnapping. You are not here to psychoanalyze a woman you don’t like.”
“Ma’am—”
“No,” I say, cutting him off. “Let’s be very clear. My work is my work. My personal life is my personal life. I am not confused about the difference. I am not attracted to pathology, nor am I incapable of distinguishing between the men I treat and the men I choose to see socially.”
I lean forward again, the movement deliberate, putting my hands flat on the table between us.
“The only reason you’re asking this is because it’s easier for you to understand a woman making a ‘bad’ choice if you can frame it as some kind of professional perversion.
It’s easier to dismiss me as compromised than it is to accept that a competent, intelligent woman might have feelings for a man like Vito Conti. ”
I let that sink in.
“You don’t want to believe I chose him. You want to believe I was manipulated, or that I have some kind of twisted fascination with violence. Because the alternative—that I simply saw something in him that you refuse to see—is too threatening to your neat little case file.”
The room is silent.
Callahan’s face has gone completely blank. The controlled mask is gone, replaced by a rigid, shuttered anger. He’s been backed into a corner, and he knows it.
“I’ll tell you what my work has taught me, Agent. It’s taught me that violent men are not all the same. It’s taught me that the capacity for violence is not the sum total of a man.”
I pause, letting the words hang in the deadened air of the room.
“I know exactly who Vito Conti is,” I say, my voice dropping back to that quiet, dangerous register.
“I’ve seen parts of him that you will never see, because you are not interested in looking beyond the label you’ve already assigned him.
You are not looking for truth. You are looking for confirmation. ”
I meet his eyes directly.
And then I drive the final nail home.
“You call this an investigation. But it’s not. It’s a lazy exercise in profiling. And frankly, I expected better from the FBI.”
Valerie makes a small sound beside me. A cough, but it isn’t. It’s the sound of a lawyer trying desperately not to laugh.
Callahan stares at me.
He has no response.
He can’t threaten me further without crossing a serious line, especially considering I'm supposed to be the victim.
He can’t argue the point without admitting his own bias.
And he can’t retreat without looking weak.
He is, in effect, trapped.
“So,” I say, standing up this time. “This interview is over. I have been cooperative. I have answered your questions. I have provided a statement that is both truthful and strategically necessary. I will not be interrogated about my psychological fitness or my personal preferences for partners any longer.”
I look down at him.
“You want to know who I am? I’m a woman who makes her own choices. And right now, my choice is to walk out of this room.”
I turn to Valerie. “Let’s go.”
“If you have anything more to ask my client, you go through my office,” Valerie says, and we walk out without a backward glance.